For those of you not willing to click the link, J.K. Rowling put out a statement in an interview telling us that she regrets Hermione and Ron getting together, that it should it have been Harry instead, and as it is they’ll need counseling.

Not that everyone in the series probably couldn’t use counseling, but hey. And this is the second time she’s done something like this, trying to change the way we think about the story long after it’s been written – The first was when she announced Dumbledore was gay.

From my corner, I have no issue with either change (Not really a huge potter fan in the first place), but it still irks me in some way – I guess that instead of being careful and writing these ideas into the books when they were written, she’s come out later and gone “Well I screwed up, it should be that way.”

But of course she has the right to say whatever she wants about her work. Hell, I defended George Lucas’ abysmal edits to the original series – of course I have no requirement to watch the new ones or care about them whatsoever – but I do agree on some level with his idea that an artist should keep trying to fix and tweak their art until it’s ‘right’. But it does raise an interesting question, because pretty much anytime anything like this happens (an artist changing their work long after it’s released) it’s met with open vehemence. It’s a stance that in a sense flies right in the face of allowing the user to create their own meaning.

It gets into the ideas of aesthetics we’ve been playing around with, but once the object is imbued with a meaning and set out into the world, you get your users or perceivers creating the other half – They fill in and understand the work through their own lens and get to know it as themselves. It’s sort of the idea of emergence that game developers work towards, just muted and hidden within one person’s interpretation. And to come back in as an artist or designer and say “Whoops I fucked up, let me edit that” can easily rip apart someone’s understanding, and have them lose a lot of faith in both your story, and you as a creator.

So when is it okay to do so? When is it better to just start on an entirely new work? I mean in either of my examples, I doubt that many Potter or Star Wars fans were irrevocably thrusted out of enjoying their fandom, but these types of edits seem to be damaging in some way. What lesson is there to be learned as a designer?

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As we have discussed before in class, projects are never finished, they are good enough. However, to me, when they try to go back and created a new and improved version, they run the risk of alienating a lot of people. Recently I saw where Microsoft is starting to concede and rumors have it we will see the return of the classic Start Menu in Windows 8.2. It is good how artists and designers are willing to admit when they messed up, it creates a humble attitude that a lot of people in the area need. However, when they go in and try to start changing things around, things they were not happy with, but their audience was, it opens a whole new can of worms. Maybe they need to look into things more and just say, it’s good enough and move on to their next project (I still cannot bear to watch Return of the Jedi with that musical number, luckily they released the 1993 laser disc master on DVD around 2005).

I really liked this post. I had not thought of JK Rowling’s clarifications as a way of editing people’s perception of the piece itself. When I relate this to design though, it goes back to all design being Political, and design being about destruction and change. Be it affecting the reality of 1 person or that of 1000++. Take Facebook for example, they continuously modify their features, interface, and privacy policies, and some people hate it initially, but they just continue using it. When it comes to literature or movies, I feel it perhaps affects people more intensely than a UI update… I feel the challenge here is not just get to the point where interaction design can affect people the same way a novel does (perhaps medium specificity is at play here). Or is the fact that software and technology itself is so dynamic that people are not so attached to it? Always ready for the next version…

I recently watched an interview in which JK Rowling was interviewed by Daniel Radcliffe (the actor who played Harry Potter in the films). It was fascinating to hear her speak about the characters in the series, particularly Dumbledore.

It’s clear she understands these characters as human beings themselves, with lives full of mistakes, triumphs, struggles, and everything else we all deal with in this world. Remember – she started writing Potter in 1990 and didn’t complete the seventh book until nearly 20 years later. She lived with the cast of Potter in her head for two decades. Radcliffe asked her specifically about the revelation of Dumbledore’s sexual orientation, and her response was that she was surprised by the outcry. She went on to tell a story from early in the first movie in which she offhandedly scribbled “Dumbledore’s gay” in the margin of a script for the director. To her, she had understood Dumbledore to be gay from the earliest moment’s she had come to understand the character. It surprised her when other people mistook Dumbledore as not gay because it seemed so exceedingly natural to her.

I guess my point – and the relevance to design – lies in the difference between the “fan” perception and the experience of the creator. While the public announcement of that aspect of Dumbledore’s character may have rattled fans, it was old news to her. She never could have anticipated the public’s reaction.

As designers, our creations will have effects for which we will never be able to adequately prepare. Features that seem hardly worth mentioning may break the whole experience for your end users. Like Angélica said, design is about destruction and change – it’s difficult to predict how a process of destruction will play out.